Use OPML to add your entire cohort to Feedly

This post will show you how to use Feedly to display posts from students in your MALAT cohort.

Feedly is an RSS feed reader that lets you collect web-based content in one place so that you can organize it and read it when convenient. A free Feedly account provides everything you need to use within the MALAT program and there are Android and iOS apps available as well.

Get a Feedly account  

Go to https://feedly.com and select the ‘Get Started for Free’ button. You will need to provide an email address to set up an account (or use Facebook or Google to log in). Note that you may need to subscribe to one feed in Feedly before you can use the steps below to import several feeds. Use the steps presented at the time you set up your account to subscribe to any single feed (the selector will offer several choices).

Get your OPML file  

An OPML file allows you to follow all the students in your MALAT cohort with one file. Using this system is much faster than adding each blog feed URL one at a time and it will group them into one category on Feedly.

1. Go to a course WordPress site, e.g. LRNT521, in the right column, locate the ‘Your Blogs’ block and find one of the OPML links, like the ‘All Posts OPML File’ link.
2. Use a right-mouse click and ‘Save link as…’ to download the OPML file (it will be in .xml format). For Macs use Ctrl+Click and ‘Download linked file’.
   

Go to Feedly

1. Open Feedly in a new browser tab. Add at least one item before you can import the OPML file. Type in a topic, web site or url , e.g. Edublogs.
2. Click the Follow button
3. Click ‘+ New Feed’. Enter a Feed Name, e.g. Edublogs
4. Next, look for and select the Organize Feeds button in the left-side navigation, to the right of ‘FEEDS’.
5. On the new right-side content, select ‘Import OPML’ in the upper right corner.
   
6. Use the ‘Choose OPML file’ button to navigate to your OPML file and then select ‘Import’ to add these feeds to your Feedly.
   

Look in the left side navigation, the blogs of your fellow students will now be displayed in a category named for your course. E.g. LRNT 521, LRNT 523, etc.